I have a question...if this takes place in 2015 are we taking into consideration what we hopefully will have learned up until that point or are we basing everything on the fact that we have really learned nothing up to that point?? Does that question make sense...not sure if I am asking it right.

I am trying to use the idea that the colony-planet has been given a good going-over by both unmanned probes and a recon-flight.The thing is, there are always surprises. Mankind has regularly thought it knew how the wild 'worked' here on earth and nearly as regularly been wrong. I would guess that'll happen a time or two on the colony planet as well.Being a colonist really sounds like fun, doesn't it?

As usualle, I bounce back and forth between which livestock i think will work best; recently, I went back to pigs being useful. Problem is, my lady-friend takes a fairly strict view on diet; she won't touch pork(The bible says no, so it's no) You wouldn't believe how annoyed she got when I just mentioned how useful I thought pigs were! "They're unclean, you know that. No one in their right mind would ever eat one."

I can tell, by the last three posts. Well, from the first post on this thread, I would say that, of course, all animals have a different purpose. Goats are handy, but hard to fence. Sheep are good, as well. However, they are not a large industry, and so do not have many medications behind them. They are smaller, which is an advantage and disadvantage. Cows are good money makers, but have a lower reproductive rate and need bigger equipment. That's why I don't do cattle too much. The colonists? Ah, well, they had some basic livestock of course, goats, sheep, chickens, etc.

I have not read more then the last page of this thread but it sounds like it is discussing the merits of alternate species for meat production. With that in mind, I am planning to research and build facilities and equipment for raising small animals... namely smaller then a pet cat. The research is mostly to help provide better lives for laboratory and fur animals but increasingly I see such research as improving the lives of humans by providing sources of meat and improving the lives of wildlife by reducing the pressure of agriculture on land use. Guinea pigs were named "food of the gods" in the past and represent one of the longest domesticated meat animal species. For efficiency, rabbits are many times more efficient then cattle for turning plant matter into "dressed" meat. The advantage of chickens is they are omnivores and they can produce continuous high protein food in the form of eggs. Those are just three possible small meat animal choices. One problem with small animals is that they need protection from predators making industrial-scale production costly. Capybara are one species that functions as a grazing animal raised lose in the wild but farmed much like cattle. I figure jackrabbits and specifically the arctic hare and the White-Tail Jackrabbit (closely related and can cross breed with fertile young) to be a possible loose grazing animal that can out-run coyotes and kill weasels and are too big for most raptor birds.